


Indulgence and Penance

by twitchtipthegnawer



Category: Original Work
Genre: Acid Rain - Freeform, Blood and Gore, Bugs & Insects, Disembowelment, Gen, Guro, Just a lot of very unpleasant ways to die dudes, Psychological Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-18
Updated: 2018-09-18
Packaged: 2019-07-13 20:42:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16025612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twitchtipthegnawer/pseuds/twitchtipthegnawer
Summary: Once every four years, the Warren Gore Olympics provide the most taboo of entertainment for millions of viewers around the world. A single ticket costs exorbitant amounts of money, and yet they always sell out. For those who wish for the death games of eras past, it's their one chance to live their dream. Presided over by the eccentric Scott Warren, whose face remains a mystery behind his costume chipmunk head, the Gore Olympics are a veritable buffet of violence. Debtors, convicts, and the odd volunteer participate in twisted games that almost always end in a grisly demise. For the survivors, however, the rewards are great.Seth knew about the games before he was chosen to play in them, of course. But he hadn't thought he'd ever beinthem. Only one game relied on random selection, and what were the odds ofhishigh school class being selected? What were the odds of getting the letter, of having his mother dress him up in formal clothes as though this were an award to be accepted, of going to the docks and staring up at the massive luxury ship in dawning dread?What were the odds?





	Indulgence and Penance

**Author's Note:**

> Commission from @reteryisk on twitter! The premise is all theirs, though they allowed me an astonishing amount of freedom in the details, because... angel. <3

“Ladies and gentleman!” The announcer standing in the center of the polished, wooden floor turned to meet the eyes of the audience members seated in rows above him. “It is thanks to your patronage that the Warren Gore Olympics are celebrating their twelfth anniversary tonight!”

Seth wrapped his arms tightly around himself and fought to stop shaking. His short-sleeved button-up and black slacks weren’t particularly cold, given the bright lights shining down on him from every direction, but he felt chill anyway. The short, black hairs on the back of his neck stood on end.

“And to thank you all for your continued support, we present to you: the Juvenile Battleship Bloodbath!” Another round of cheers, at which the announcer held up one gloved hand to the large ear of his squirrel mascot head. When they died down, he continued, “Tonight we have, all the way from London, England, the eighth grade class of Lily Rose Preparatory School, represented by Annie Taylor!”

Across the deceptively innocent looking gymnasium floor, Seth made eye contact with the girl standing on an identical podium to his own. She smiled, and he shuddered. How could she be younger than him?

“In the other corner, represented by Seth Richardson, Stonington, Maine has provided us some of their lovely freshmen!

“Now, esteemed guests, are you ready to see some blood?” Judging by the response, the answer was a resounding  _ yes. _ Seth ducked his head, and wished his Mom hadn’t recently trimmed his hair back down into a bowl cut. He couldn’t hide at all like this.

“Then let the JBB begin!”

Music played, and Seth knew the screens above him were displaying his class’s yearbook photos and names, so the audience could begin sending in their sick suggestions. He didn’t look up; after all, those screens wouldn’t tell him anything he could actually use. Instead he focused on the seemingly benign fact that the “gym” floor was painted with evenly-spaced white squares rather than the usual sports guidelines.

When he found himself staring so hard he started to tear up, as though it would let him see through the floor to which spaces were safe to pick, he forced himself to look back up. Again, he saw the girl, his opponent - Annie. She had braces, he noticed, and frizzy red hair. But her eyes were a green so bright they hurt to look at, and her navy-blue school uniform added to the intimidating feeling.

All too soon, it was time for the game to begin. The announcer had one final job before he was expected to get the hell out of there. He removed a large, silver coin from the pocket of his butler outfit, and flipped it high into the air.

It spun, and spun, and spun. It felt like everyone in the room was holding their breath.

It landed, and a gloved hand slapped down over it, hiding the result.  The announcer turned to him and held his hands up. “Seth, if you’d be so kind?”

“Oh, um. Heads?”

Shifting his grip, squirrel butler held the result up between a thumb and forefinger. The cameras zoomed, revealing a chipmunk looking over its shoulder, bushy tail taking up most of the image.  _ Tails. _

Annie leaned into the microphone on her podium without missing a beat. Enunciating clearly, she said, “B-1.”

With a hiss of hydraulics and a short drumroll, the second square in the first row began to rise out of the floor. Its clear walls gave the audience (and Seth) an unobstructed view of the person inside. He didn’t want to look; it felt like everything was going too fast. This morning, he hadn’t even known his class had been selected, and now he might be watching one die before his very eyes in mere moments.

But he couldn’t look away, because what if Annie had guessed wrong? What if it was one of  _ her  _ classmates trapped in that plastic box?

It wasn’t.

Becca was a sweet girl. She always wore her hair in some kind of braid, pushed her glasses up snootily when she answered questions in class, and hadn’t ever made fun of Seth. Not when he’d been the smallest boy in the class, and not when his mom packed him weird, gross food. She always seemed too confident in herself to need to put down others.

Now, she was staring around at the crowd, tears streaming from her wide, brown eyes. Her hair had started to come undone, and her mouth moved in pleas none of them could hear.

“Oh, a Stonington student, right off the bat! Nice guess, little Annie. And what will the method of murder be?”

Wrinkling her nose, Annie said, “Default list?” There were some boos in the audience, and Seth wondered why she didn’t look happier. Her survival was riding on this game, too.

On the screens, a colorful list popped up and began cycling through options. It started fast, then slowed enough that Seth began catching the odd word. They all made him shudder.

Seth couldn’t look away as it finally slid to a stop. The crowd cheered at the result.

_ Acid Rain. _

Stomach churning, Seth tried to look away. He wouldn’t be the first contestant to cover his eyes or his ears, wouldn’t even be the first to puke up the ridiculously fancy hors d'oeuvres he’d been provided. But then Becca looked at him, and two burly men dressed identically (sans the mascot heads, which were a canary and a robin, respectively) came up carrying watering cans and stepladders.

It was like Becca was trying to tell him,  _ “save me.” _ Except they both knew it was too late for that. So she stared at him, and he stared back, and she set her jaw in some kind of perverse determination. If she had to suffer, the least Seth could do was witness. One friendly gaze in the sea of hungry, sadistic ones wouldn’t save her life, but it might make dying easier.

The two men removed the wooden top of her prison, got up on the stepladders, and held the watering cans above her head. Their grey jumpsuits looked so innocuous, harmless, wrong. She bit her bottom lip, and didn’t beg.

Slowly, painfully slowly, those normal-looking cans tipped. Becca’s mouth opened.

Acid dripped onto her head and sizzled against her hair. A putrid smell wafted towards Seth in the same moment Becca cried out and threw her arms over her head.

In mere moments the droplets had eaten holes through the white sleeves of her blouse and begun burrowing pits into her flesh. Her arms went pink, and then red, dripping blood as well as acid. She tried to curl up, or maybe her knees just gave out. Either way, she began screaming. It echoed from the speakers around Seth, almost loud enough to hide the jeers from the crowd.

Those horrible screams were better than the gurgling that began as glints of white bone became visible. She was  _ melting, _ a thick soup puddling around her grotesquely. 

When the first of her organs slipped from a hole in her skin and splashed onto the ground, Seth turned and puked into the trash can they kept on each podium for that express purpose. With the sour burning in his nose, at least he couldn’t smell her anymore.

Her noises died down, and then the lid was replaced, cutting off even the residual hissing. Slowly, her box sank back under the gym’s floor, where Seth knew her gruesome remains would sit and horrify nearby students.

The screens flashed Becca’s picture, now crossed out in a large, red X. And then they showed Seth, and he felt his heart stop before he remembered that he wasn’t dying. Not yet.

“First death of the night started off with a bang, huh folks? Let’s see if Stonington can return the favor!”

A timer began under his name. One minute to pick a square. One minute to condemn someone to death.

With two seconds to go, Seth finally forced out a warbling, terrified, “E-4.”

Somewhere in the middle. Somewhere he prayed would be harmless. Some of those squares were empty, he was sure; the numbers didn’t add up.

Unfortunately, E-4 wasn’t empty.

Though Joey had been anything but a kind classmate to Seth, this one was so much harder than Becca had been. Seth was responsible, now. It was his fault. He didn’t hear what the announcer was saying, too wrapped up in the angry, betrayed look on Joey’s face.

He was wearing his letterman jacket. His golden-blond hair was gelled up. He reminded Seth sharply that they were all still kids, and maybe that was why Seth breathed those next words.

“Drown him.”

“Drowning? Did I hear right?” Seth nodded at the announcer, but didn’t take his eyes off Joey as understanding dawned between them. “Well, audience, I don’t know that this boy’s a witch, but are you ready for a good old-fashioned execution?” It didn’t matter that they seemed enthused that Seth had taken the initiative where Annie hadn’t. What mattered was the nod Joey gave Seth, even as some mockery of a bucket brigade was formed by mascot-headed employees.

They’d had a stupid game of  _ would you rather _ in class, months ago. Seth would likely have forgotten all about it were it not for a very pertinent question about drowning or burning.

Water filled Joey’s prison too quickly for him to try to use it to climb out. He did manage to get one hand around the rim, near the end, but then the lid was slammed down so hard his fingers came off with little spurts of blood. Under the water, a stream of bubbles escaped as Joey screamed. Red bloomed around him, trailing behind his stumps when Joey cradled his hand to his chest.

Despite all that, he didn’t fight too hard to live. Didn’t press his lips to the bare inch of air Seth was sure lay below the lid. His hair was swaying almost naturally by the time they lowered him back down. It couldn’t have been a peaceful way to die, not with the way Seth was sure his lungs burned before the end, but…

It was the best he could do.

“C-4.”

This time around, the floor rose to reveal an unfamiliar face. Seth breathed a sigh of relief, though it was immediately followed by guilt. His survival may have depended on this stranger’s death, but that didn’t change the fact that she was a person too, with hopes and dreams about to be cut short.

Her blonde hair was perfectly done up, and her makeup made her look older than fourteen. The school uniform she was wearing matched Annie’s, though.

“Audience choice.”

“Hear that? Here comes the one, the only, audience choice murder method! Let’s see which of you bloodthirsty lovelies shelled out the most to bombshell this blonde, shall we?”

Wincing, Seth watched the submitted methods flash up on screen. They were all horribly brutal, and he was doubly glad he’d made a suggestion himself, now. Little counters went next to each suggestion, ticking upwards as they showed who had paid the highest price, and would therefore have their method chosen.

_ Archery practice.  _ He darted a look to Annie, to see what she thought of one of her classmates dying like this. To his horror, he found her smiling, chewing a thumbnail like she couldn’t wait another moment. He looked back to the doomed student quickly. For the first time, Seth got to see one of the clear side walls of the cage open up and release a participant into the gymnasium. Employees lined up, on the sidelines this time, compound bows in their hands. The girl didn’t react to them at all.

Instead, she ran straight for Annie. “You little  _ whore - ” _

Her voice cut off abruptly, and she stopped running. Her arms fell to her sides as she looked at the arrow sprouting from one shoulder. She began to breathe harder.

And abruptly, she was not where she’d been standing.

Seth turned his head to see her making a break for a small gap in employees at one sideline. The crowd’s cheers swelled, arrows raised to point at her back. One flew, and to Seth’s shock, she dodged it and it ended up glancing off of an employee’s leg.

For a split second, it seemed like there might be hope. And then arrows began finding their marks. One in her side, under her ribs. One in her thigh, which she stubbornly ran on anyway (thanks to adrenaline, Seth thought). Blood soaked her clothes, a high keening sound filled the air, and it took him a moment to realize it was coming from her.

Then an arrow speared through her neck. One again, she stopped. Took one stumbling step, and fell. Her body wracked with final attempts to breathe, but stilled when blood sprayed from her slack lips.

They dragged her back to her case, leaving behind a trail of blood on the ground. Tossed her in, and let her join the others once more. After all, the game was only just beginning.

However, when it came time for him to name another space, Seth found he couldn’t make a sound. He opened his mouth, dug his fingers into his elbow, but said nothing.

One minute ran out. The buzzer was loud, but it didn’t echo in Seth’s head the way the next words did.

“What’s the matter, cat got your tongue? Or are you ready for us to introduce,” here, the announcer patted his hands on his thighs in a pantomime of the earlier drumroll, “the deck of many deaths!”

He wanted to tell the announcer off. He wanted to get it over with. He didn’t move.

Hard soles clicking on the wood floor, Squirrel produced a deck with a flourish and shuffled it quickly. He held it out, flat on his palm, for Seth to take a card from. Though his throat burned with unsaid words, Seth did. He took in the illustration and short phrase even as the result flashed up on the screens.

“Too bad, Stonington! What awful luck! There’s only three of those cards in the whole deck.”

Seth knew that.  _ Everyone _ in the room knew that. It was part of why the audience cheered so bloodthirsty and pleased.

_ Choose from your own class. _ Seth shook his head. He couldn’t do it. He  _ couldn’t. _

“First name that comes to mind, come on. Who’ll it be? Zack? Casey? How about - ”

“Fynn,” Seth blurted. He couldn’t stand to hear all those names, knowing they’d die soon.

“You heard him, boys! Bring up C-1!”

Up slid the spot right beside where Becca had been. Fynn, when he was raised, already looked pale and sickly. But not surprised, Seth noticed. Not surprised at all. He’d been Joey’s closest friend, and something of a lackey, but he’d been nothing if not stalwart. Seth hoped that would carry him through, now, though he knew the chances were unlikely.

“And the method of death will be…” That horribly familiar sound as the screens cycled through options. Seth didn’t read them this time, but Fynn did. His muscular arms seemed frail when they shook like that. “Puppeteer? Oh, we haven’t had one of  _ those _ in a while!”

Unlike the others, Seth didn’t immediately understand what this method was. As the side swung open and Fynn was confronted by five burly employees, however, he realized it was going to be more involved than he could, perhaps, handle. And yet when he tried to turn away he felt even more guilt.

Wires were wrapped around his ankles, wrists, shoulders, knees, and neck. All of them were tightened until the circulation began to cut off. His skin turned red, then purple,  his hands in particular swelling under twofold pressure. Blood trickled from the wire around his neck, but the ruddy color spotting his cheeks made it clear this was no relief. The wires were handed off to an exceptionally large man in a moose head, who then climbed a ladder they’d brought out.

Holding half the loose ends in one hand and half in the other, he began to make Fynn dance. Music started to play, something festive on a calliope, which was all the confirmation Seth needed that he would never attend any sort of circus after this. Football-hardened muscles fought the pull of the wires as Fynn tried to get his fingers between the noose and his neck, but it was a lost cause.

Each jerk and yank had Fynn moving like - well, like a marionette. Or like some kind of giant insect. Certainly nothing  _ human, _ with the way his joints would spontaneously slump or raise, independent of one another. He made a gurgling sound that was close enough to the way Becca had sounded that Seth flinched, even before Fynn rasped, “Help me.”

Without the microphones strategically placed around the floor, no one would have been able to hear those faint words. With them, everyone could laugh as Moose grabbed the throat-wire in both hands and pulled to the side hard enough to lift Fynn off the ground for a moment. His purpling skin made him look half-dead already. As soon as Moose’s grip went slack enough to set him back on the floor, a spurt of blood arced out over the arena.

Carotid artery, Seth realized. It would end things so much quicker, and his shoulders slumped in some paltry form of relief.

By the time the song ended it was clear they were playing with nothing more than a corpse. What had once been a handsome young man was now nothing more than a hunk of cold flesh bouncing erratically over a significant puddle of blood. When Moose dropped the wires, he slumped into it like, well.

A puppet with its strings cut.

For the second time that night, employees dragged a body back to its box and sent it off beneath the ground. Seth wondered who was next to Fynn. Wondered how they’d react to his exsanguinated body.

To his horror, he realized this one had been  _ easier _ to watch. Even though it had been his fault. He  _ couldn’t _ let himself get desensitized, no, never.

Annie smiled from across the way, utterly unaffected by what they’d seen. “D-4.” It was odd, her fancy British accent and succinct way of saying those short little phrases. As though she didn’t care what the outcome was.

Up came the next box, once again containing one of Annie’s classmates. “Looks like these kiddos are hurtling head-first towards suicide, am I right folks?” Squirrel and the crowd alike seemed delighted at Seth and Annie’s bad luck so far, but while Seth had been agonizing over his choices, Annie still seemed nonchalant.

Right up until she caught sight of the head of dyed purple hair. For the first time, Seth saw her jaw clench from clear across the room.

She didn’t say anything. Just made eye contact with the dark-skinned girl, and nodded solemnly. The girl nodded back. Seth couldn’t see her expression, but her shoulders were remarkably relaxed given the situation.

“Fire,” said Annie. “Burn her up.”

Being reminded of Fynn was the last thing Seth had expected in this moment. It almost made up for Annie’s coldness at that blonde girl’s death.

Had she been a bully? She had called Annie a (Seth winced remembering) whore. Maybe that explained Annie’s sadistic reaction.

“Bad news buttercup,” Squirrel said it casually, but Annie’s whole frame went stiff. “The audience votes no on that one. So, instead…”

Purple hair pressed her palms to the sides of the box, slammed them twice. Seth wondered how much she could hear from in there; her lips were moving, when she turned far enough for him to see them, but he couldn’t hear a word.

_ Dropped, _ Seth read. Annie closed her eyes. Shook her head.

Someone came out to unfasten the lid, a hook descending from the ceiling with horrible inevitability. The girl seemed at first to have accepted her fate, but when the hook went not only through her clothes but also deep into her shoulder, her scream echoed in the speakers. Annie tucked her face into her own shoulder, her hair obscuring her expression. Like always, Seth felt obligated to watch.

That hook ascended so slowly that her lungs ran out of air before she was even halfway up. She clutched the chain above the hook in both trembling arms, trying desperately to keep the weight off the wound soaking her side in blood. But with one arm injured, and neither as strong as Fynn’s, or even Joey’s, had been, it was a lost cause.

Honestly, Seth considered whether it would be better for her arm to rip off from her body and send her falling prematurely. It would put an end to things faster, but she might very well survive the initial fall that way. Now, he watched the endless crawl upwards, her hoarse cries as she neared the top. The chain slowed even further, and she seemed to realize her death was imminent. She kicked her legs and rotated halfway around to fully face Annie again.

“Win, Andromeda!”

Wind pushed her hair back in a long stream as she fell. It seemed to last forever.

Until, abruptly, it was over.

_ Thud! _

Morbidly curious, Seth looked at the lack of blood spray in the clear box. Her ribs and hips had split through her skin to push her shirt and navy blazer unnaturally up in odd points. A single teardrop shimmered on her cheek, a detail he couldn’t forget even as her empty, staring eyes lowered to join the others. That, and her last words. Annie’s full name.

A daze came over him. He heard, as if from outside his body, a dull voice. “F-6.”

Another girl wearing the Lily Rose school uniform. She breathed harshly, and Seth found he was doing so, as well.

So many deaths passed in the next hour or so that they began to blur together. The black-haired girl from F-6 was pressed from chest to hip, sightless eyes staring upwards long after her ribcage gave way with an echoing crack. Annie selected G-3, and Zack was strangled by a yet another burly nobody in a soullessly smiling costume.

A-1, a Lily Rose boy died to forcefed poison which sent him into convulsions and left him foaming at the mouth. F-1, another boy who ended up bisected by a cartoonishly large saw (Seth swallowed down bile at the smell of split organs). A-3, Stonington. D-4, Lily Rose. A-4, Stonington. B-7, and finally one of the empty boxes offered Seth a moment of respite.

Through it all, Seth kept finding himself drawn to watching Annie. She was… strange, in a way he couldn’t put his finger on. She acted truly delighted when she picked her own classmates, even going so far as to clap her hands at one point. But she didn’t often suggest methods of death the way sadistic participants had in past games.

Instead, she chose audience suggestions for her own classmates, and the default list for Seth’s. Except for that girl with the purple hair, of course. When they hit 25 dead students, and the music began to signal the halftime break, Seth held her memory in his mind. He and Annie were walked off to a small room while a singer headed to the center of the bloodstained floor and commercials scrolled on the screens.

He would have to spend the next thirty minutes with her. He couldn’t do that if he thought of her as a monster, instead of as a girl who had just lost a friend.

As soon as they were in the beige-walled room, Annie made a beeline for the table full of hors d'oeuvres. Seth actually pressed a hand to his stomach at the sight, and not only because he had a suspicion those were the same snacks from before the event began, hours ago. How could anyone be hungry after seeing what they had seen?

“I can’t believe you’re older than me,” Annie said, when she had crackers piled high with cheese in both hands. “You look so timid. And you’re kind of stupid.”

Just a girl who’s lost a friend. He took a deep breath before responding, “Are you baiting me?”

“Maybe I am. But it’s just because you’re really bad at this; you haven’t even figured out the trick to student placements.”

Breath freezing in his chest, Seth breathed, “What?”

She raised her eyebrows and shoved a cracker in her mouth. “I’m not going to tell you. You already have an advantage, with five extra students.”

For what felt like the billionth time that night, Seth flinched. He ended up sitting on the cream couch for lack of anything to say. The cushions felt hard as rock beneath him.

Words welled up under his tongue, and he found he actually wanted to say them, even if he couldn’t respond directly to the hint she’d just dropped.

“Are you enjoying this?”

Humming, Annie gave Seth the exact same grin she’d given her classmates as they died brutally. “What gave it away?”

“I would say your attitude, but,” Seth hesitated. His hands were balled up on his knees, and he forced them to spread, to relax. “You keep choosing the audience choices for death methods.”

“They’re more brutal. Or did you not notice? I suppose you’re more stupid than I thought.”

“But they’re a gamble.”

“This whole thing is a gamble. I quite like those.”

A frown grew on Seth’s face as he considered that. Annie didn’t seem like the sort of person who took crazy risks, for all she was emphasizing the fact that she’d apparently signed herself up for this. She’d put too much emphasis on the “trick” she’d mentioned, which apparently allowed her to strategize. And if she wanted to strategize…

“You’ve got allies in the audience.”

Annie paused, looked unabashedly surprised for a second. Her red hair fell in her face when she nodded, finally. “You could say that. Guess you’re not as dumb as you look.”

“...Is it because you’re rich? Family friends?”

“You could say that,” she repeated. But for all her acting, which Seth could find no better word for than  _ coy, _ she didn’t sound happy. Didn’t sound like the friends, if that was what they were, were people she’d eagerly asked help from.

Incredibly loud singing barely permeated the walls of the room. The halftime show progressed as planned, but Seth felt like time was moving far too fast. He needed more, to consider Annie’s hint, to consider how she acted when he mentioned - oh. That was it.

“That girl. The one you had shot full of arrows.” Annie crunched loudly through a tartlet, as if to show she wasn’t listening. “She called you a whore.”

No response. Seth spoke slowly, gathering half-finished strings of thought as he did. “Your mom, is she - ”

“So you do have a brain!” Annie sounded brittle. “Good job, ace detective. You’re right. She’s got a bunch of clients in the audience, and later she’s gonna suck their stinky little cocks as thanks for helping me get a bunch of my classmates.”

Shocked, Seth’s mouth dropped open. Annie stalked up to him, put her foot on the couch and leaned over him menacingly. Her green eyes looked manic, unhinged,  _ dangerous. _ He swallowed hard.

“Now do you get it? You can’t win. Even if you figure everything else out, too. I can buy all the hints I need. And then, when you’re the only one left in your class, I won’t even need to ask dear old Mum to make sure your death is as painful as possible. I can do that by myself. What do you think it feels like, having your limbs tied off until they go gangrenous and die, and then getting the rotten meat fed to you piece by piece? What about getting your skin burned until it flakes away, then pulled off with a lint-roller a little at a time until you bleed out?”

As gruesome as the imagery was, as much as Seth’s blood felt cold in his veins with the fear of what came next, he found he could respond, this time. “Even if you win, was it worth it?”

He felt older than his age when he met her gaze, next. But it was fitting, because she looked it too. This might’ve been nothing more than a sickening sideshow, but it had given Seth something he shared with Annie and no one else. He knew she understood he was talking about her friend, with the purple hair and empty, crying eyes.

“She agreed with me,” Annie breathed the words like they were fire. “She knew the risk.”

Both of them jerked apart when Squirrel burst through the door and told them to be ready in five minutes. Seth wanted to say that Annie hadn’t answered his question, but he thought she might have, in a way. He stared at the table of snacks without really seeing it, and thought about what she said. About what he had to do next.

About how to win.

It came to him like a lightning strike on a sunny day.

Battleship. They were playing battleship, more or less.

And if that was true, then most of the students would have others from their same class beside them. He thought through the placements, and surprised himself with his ability to remember them perfectly. Then again, he supposed one didn’t lightly forget executions.

Shoulder-checking him on the way out the door, Annie whispered, “Good luck.”

Even if she’d given Seth a chance to speak, he wasn’t sure what he would’ve said.

“And we’re back, folks! Let’s see what our lovely little contestants have in store for us next!”

Seth was the one to go first, this time. He pressed one palm to his stomach in a desperate attempt to calm it, and knew that his voice was going to come out weak and pathetic. That was okay. He had a plan, now. He didn’t need to look strong to pull it off.

“E-2.” The box began to rise as soon as he spoke. He held his breath as he watched it.

The boy trapped between four clear walls was a stranger. A tiny stranger, actually, too small even for an eighth grader. Seth thought he may have skipped a grade. It made him sick, but…

_ Yes, _ he’d been right. D-2 and F-2 had also contained Lily Rose students in their telltale navy blue uniforms. And that meant he and Annie were on equal footing, finally.

From across the arena, Annie seethed.

“Default list.” Seth was surprised to find he enunciated more clearly now.

Momentary victory couldn’t change the nature of the game, however. The execution method flashed up on the boards:  _ cubing. _ He didn’t like the sound of that.

Employees pulled the boy from his prison and wheeled out a strange looking piece of equipment. It had a flat, solid, clear wall, to which four straps were attached. The boy’s cherub curls bounced wildly as he thrashed in the employees’ grips, but it wasn’t hard for them to bind his wrists and ankles accordingly.

And he was left staring, petrified, at the metal grid that sat about two feet in front of him. Dread grew on both his and Seth’s faces as the mechanism whirred to life. With a grind of metal-on-metal, the grid began sinking closer and closer to the clear wall. To make matters worse, the thing began to rotate slowly, allowing all the guests a chance to see his crying, snot-covered face in real life, on top of the close-ups on the screens.

Metal touched his heaving chest gently, at first. But then it began to push in.

Turning his cheek to the side, the boy tried to flatten himself to the wall as much as he could. It was useless; the metal pressed on inexorably.

First it cut into his skin, lines of red trickling down and following the cold, dark grey until they could drip onto the wooden floor. But then it cut deeper. As if he couldn’t help it, the boy continued to struggle, and Seth caught flashes of shockingly yellow fat through his skin. Then there came the first  _ crack, _ his bones splintering under the pressure when they could not split or shift out of the way.

If Seth thought that was bad, then what came next was so much worse. Organs were cut through with an inevitability that did nothing to distract from the fact that the boy was still alive. When one of his eyes popped out of its socket under pressure, when his lungs were forced to stillness, he was still twitching. It wasn’t until his skull  _ crunched _ and brain matter splattered to the sides that Seth felt he could finally stop watching.

Still, he heard the sticky sound it made as they cranked the machine open enough to let his mangled remains fall. He heard the - the  _ sweeping, _ as they put him back in his box. And Seth thought about how they cleaned him up like a common spill, and tried very hard to forget the cross-sections of his innards the audience was being treated to right now.

Almost before the announcer even signaled that it was Annie’s turn, she was leaning into her microphone, saying, “G-7.”

Though that was adjacent to G-6, which had contained a Lily Rose student, Seth was unsurprised when it raised to reveal another of his classmates. F-6 had also contained a Lily Rose student, after all, and L-shaped ships didn’t exist in battleship.

Lack of surprise didn’t mean a lack of grief, though. Billy had been a nice kid. He always sat near Seth in class, like the puny nerd could keep him safe. Seth hadn’t spent enough time talking to him. Hadn’t ever asked if his white-blond hair was natural or not. He’d wondered, but… it seemed silly, now, to worry about phrasing, about being embarrassing.

He might not ever get to find out.

“Audience choice.”

Perhaps because the “generous” donor hadn’t been able to think up a snazzy name for this one, Seth immediately knew what was going to happen. He didn’t want to think about it.

Large tubs were carried out this time, and the lid was removed rather than one of the walls. Billy’s tan skin looked ashy with fear already, and that was before they dropped the ants in.

How did they even have all of these things prepared? Seth couldn’t imagine the amount of planning that went into this.

Deep red carapaces swarmed their way over Billy’s body, some of them streaming into his mouth and nose. He coughed, and sprayed tiny ants and blood alike, but there were too many of them for that to help for long.

Some burrowed under his skin, darkening it to black where they tore through blood vessels to create bruises. His flesh moving from underneath was an image that would haunt Seth forever, but then, today had already proven itself a nightmare.

Thankfully Billy seemed to suffocate before the internal bleeding could kill him. His clothes were slicked and sticky in patches where his skin had been eaten through, but the bloating of his belly was more disturbing. That, and the way his lifeless body continued to move even as they lowered him back down.

Despite that, Seth found he was ready when the timer once again began to count down his turn. He hadn’t understood how this could’ve been called a game, for the first half. Now, it made a terrible kind of sense.

E-6 was a safe enough bet, and proved the right choice as another Lily Rose boy died - this time, drawn and quartered by humans so strong Seth thought they must be monsters beneath those masks. His limbs tore off ragged, strings of flesh trailing raw and bloody to the ground.

Everything smelled of blood and puke, more so when Annie called out D-1. Though the student who had evidently puked all over herself while she’d been waiting was from Annie’s class, Annie didn’t seem too upset. Not even when Seth counted up in his head, and realized.

There were only four Lily Rose students left down there.

Which, of course, didn’t mean that things were going to go smoothly.

Annie’s latest pick died to having her belly slit open and her organs pulled slowly out of her body. This was less awful than Seth had expected; at least this kept the organs fairly intact, and so there was no smell of shit that accompanied the messier deaths. He didn’t think he could handle that at the moment.

His callous thoughts had him hesitating when his turn came again, though.

He wasn’t calculating causes of death according to their humanity, anymore, but according to whether or not they helped him.

Digging the nails of one hand into the opposite wrist, Seth said, “C-2.”

Horror grew, choking, in his chest. Another Lily Rose student. Another step towards winning.

“Headshot,” he said, and it sounded like he was begging. She certainly wasn’t going to beg for herself; it looked like she was trying to shout insults at Annie.

Unsurprisingly, the audience rejected that. C-2 girl, whose hair looked like a less frizzy version of Annie’s fiery red, came out of the box screaming profanity in a surprising Irish accent.

“Fucking cunt! How dare you! I trusted you, I  _ trusted _ you, and you’re gonna kill us all!”

“Cry me a river, love,” said Annie, sounding as if she was on the edge of laughing.

Did she not realize how few classmates she had left?

It was difficult to muse on that when Seth had to watch her get beheaded, red hair soaking through with blood and her slack-jawed face proving a myth Seth had never wanted to know the truth of. She really did blink, afterwards.

One swift blow meant nothing if she were trapped in her skull, screaming, for the last moments of her life. How long would she remain conscious for? Did she feel it, when they dropped her back into the box? Did the light leave her eyes as she sank into the darkness beneath the floor? Was she cursing Annie, right until the end?

“D-6.” Seth knew what that meant. He didn’t know, however, how he would feel when Ash was revealed, suddenly.

Just about his only friend in the class, Ash was kind of a weird kid. All buzz-cut hair and baggy clothes, even now, when they’d all been told to dress formally. Deep bags under their eyes, and Seth knew as they made eye contact with him that he needed this one to be quick. Needed this one to be painless.

Needed it not to happen, really, but he couldn’t have that.

Sadism shone in Annie’s eyes when he looked up. His face was stricken, and he knew he’d shown his hand. He could still win, Annie might still be unable to make good on her promise of killing him slowly. But Ash, well.

“Break it in half,” Annie said. Ash was hard to gender on sight by design, so it wasn’t a coincidence that made Annie chose those words. That final bit of disrespect made Seth’s stomach turn.

Though this method of murder had been used in a past game, Seth knew, the audience still seemed enthused by it. Ash was pulled out of the box, their jaw wobbling as they tried to stop themself from crying, and failed.

They were put into a contraption that looked only slightly less complicated than the “cubing” one. They were laid on their back over an inverted “V,” wrists secured together at one end and ankles at the other. “Please, please, p-please,” they begged over and over, and Seth ached all the more for knowing how humiliated they would normally feel.

“Mommy, please, save me! Seth, anyone, please, I swear - ”

Pleas cut off with a gasp as the machine began to crank the two sides of the V together. Ash’s back was stretched first into an arch, the peak digging into the middle cruelly, and then further still. Their skin went ruddy with strain, sweat broke out on their brow. It didn’t look like they were getting enough air, although their mouth still tried to form words.

Like many of the other deaths with slow buildup, Seth found himself wishing it could just end already. Ash’s wrists got closer and closer to their ankles, and watching those parts was less horrible than watching their face. So Seth didn’t blink as the hands balled up together, thin lines of red trickling down as nails broke flesh.

Looking down, he was surprised to find his own nails had broken skin, too.

And then there was a  _ crack. _

Over the course of tonight, Seth had heard more than his fair share of bones breaking. None of them sounded quite like a spine.

His eyes trailed up, saw the unnaturally sharp curve of Ash’s exposed, vulnerable belly. He supposed that didn’t matter anymore, but the way their sweatshirt was riding up… it felt wrong. Just as wrong as the liquids dripping from the contraption. Blood, of course, and piss, but also something clear that Seth tentatively identified as spinal fluid.

Part of Seth wanted to swear vengeance for his lost friend. Most of him wanted to sit down on the podium and never move again.

But of course he couldn’t, and so he forced himself to enunciate, “E-1.”

Sure enough, a Lily Rose student rose from the ground. “Default list,” Seth blurted, knowing what sort of audience suggestions had come in for this class. If only he’d been able to suggest more painless things, but he kept getting shut down when he tried.

_ Zombie fight. _ Seth wondered who the fuck named these, right up until an employee in a hippo head came out wielding a large, blue bat, punctured through with nails.

No, no, no. Seth didn’t want to watch. But Annie was snorting, amused, as the girl with short, black hair was released from her box. Her eyes were a blue so bright Seth could see them clearly without having to look at the screens. She squared off against the employee, as though she could fight her way out of this.

“I know I’m not getting out of this,” she whispered, and the mics magnified it until the seemingly private words were being blasted about the immense room. “But Andromeda, neither are you.”

A scar glistened on the girl’s face as she darted forward, only to be hit by a wide swing to her waist from an employee who’d come up behind her, wielding a red bat and a capybara mask.

Like the blonde girl from the very beginning, she tried to fight. But those grey jumpsuits must’ve had some kind of armor built into them; even when she dodged between Hippo and Capybara and got one to hit the other with part of the bat, it simply glanced off.

Every blow to her body weakened her so badly. She bled from countless punctures, some of them spurting in arcs from her body. Her visible skin was a mottled mess of bruises where the nails hadn’t hit. She stumbled, once, and it was the only chance they needed to bury the weapon in her chest. Then her belly. Her face. She didn’t scream, but Seth thought that might just be because she couldn’t.

“D-3.”

An empty box slid up, prematurely ending Annie’s turn. Seth swallowed hard; two more turns. Two more and this could be over.

“C-7.” It turned out to be the right choice, once again; luck was a factor now as much as strategy. Seth had never really believed in karma, and he didn’t plan to now, with so many deaths on his hands, but. But.

C-3 Was also empty. Annie seemed - scared, for the first time. She held onto the podium, stared at the bloodstained squares like, well, like she might be able to see through them to the right places to pick.

Hope growing in his chest, Seth said, “E-7.”

The box was empty.

“Looks like we got a little repeat of the intermission there, huh folks? Pick carefully kiddos! Or should I say, pick carefully, Seth.”

What?

“That’s right, we’ve got a little surprise for our Annie! A guest has just purchased you the hint: Pick row five!”

Ice water ran in his veins. He watched as she smiled, and it didn’t even look as sadistic as it had during half-time. They were both kids trying to survive, in the end.

“G-5,” she said. The box lifted, a student inside, blood already smeared on the walls from where he’d smashed his fists into it in an attempt to break free. His knuckles dripped onto...

Navy blue pants?

“Ohh, bad luck!”

“You gave me the wrong hint.” Annie was barely audible, but then she gripped the microphone in both hands and screamed into it, “You lied! How dare you, I - ”

“What was it you said, cry me a river?” Squirrel hammed it up by scrubbing his fists under cartoony eyes, and the audience laughed. “There was only one Lily Rose student in the whole row. It’s a shame, but that’s the name of the game. And speaking of games, Stonington wins!”

Once again, all Seth could think was,  _ what? _

While they went about condemning the shrieking boy to death by grapeshot, Seth was just stunned. He watched them turn a stranger into swiss-cheese and felt almost nothing. It was over? He had won? He was going to live?

“Are you all ready for the pièce de résistance? The grand finale?”

Cheering rang in Seth’s ears. Annie shook like a leaf, her clothes trembling on her small frame so much that he could see it clearly from across the room.

“Let’s go out with a bang, shall we? Seth!”

Starting, Seth said, “Y-yes?” Out of reflex.

“Any requests for our fiery redhead?”

To his surprise, Seth found he did have one. Not a method of death, no, but a detail. Because Annie was a kid, in the end, and what she’d said at halftime weighed on his mind. She’d signed up for this, had warning, and had help. A mom who was willing to go above and beyond for her daughter’s violent plans. A mom who hadn’t stopped her.

“Make her mom do it,” Seth said. Not because it would be worse for Annie, but because blood was on that woman’s hands, and she needed to remember it.

“Everyone up for a filicide on this fine evening?” The cheers made it evident that the answer was yes. “The votes are coming in with a resounding yes! Oh, you scoundrels, you have some  _ imaginations. _ We’re gonna get some special treats set up according to your requests, and in the meantime, please enjoy these messages from our sponsors.”

Numb, Seth was walked off by the Squirrel, towards where he saw his mother standing, tear tracks smearing her eyeliner in dark lines on her pallid skin.

“You’re not supposed to be out of bed,” he said dully.

“Oh, my god.” She grabbed him by the shoulders and pressed him to her in a shaky hug. “Oh my god, you won.”

Seth repeated, “I won.” It still didn’t feel real.

His mom tried to convince him not to watch the execution. He insisted, and she acquiesced when a coughing fit cut her off. She wasn’t so sick that they had to leave, though, and so they sat in a private room with a large flat screen displaying Annie’s last moments. At first, they’d been led to the same room Seth had spent halftime in with Annie, but he’d shook his head and stood his ground. He couldn’t go back there.

So he watched, from another bland beige room he was sure had seen more than its fair share of degeneracy, and tried not to feel regret.

\---------------

Annie stood in a small hallway. The box they’d led her to had been a perfect square, and she could see a turn at the end; she guessed that it likely snaked back and forth, and hoped that this wasn’t any sort of maze. There were cameras everywhere in here, staring down at her with soulless, glistening eyes.

“The rules are thus!” Said a voice booming through speakers set close to the ceiling. “Carry the weights from one end of the hallway to the scale at the end. Don’t dilly-dally; you might notice the air getting a bit chill! Watch your step, and you might just find yourself a way out!” The hard plastic of the hallway echoed the sound back endlessly.

Why would she want a way out, though? There was death waiting for her either way, and if it wasn’t the cold...

“In honor of our latest winner, a special allowance has been made. If little Annie gets out in time, and if her mom’s feeling magnanimous, she’ll be given the chance to become little  _ orphan _ Annie! But hey, it’s better than being dead, right?”

They were lying, they had to be. A loser had never been set free, not even at the cost of another’s life. The sadists who set up this game sure did know what they were doing, though. Annie kind of admired it.

Because how could she simply lie down and let herself die, now?

Already the air felt colder than it should. She didn’t see any traps in this hallway, though the “watch your step” portion of her instructions led her to believe there would be some later. So she jogged, rounded the left-hand turn, and then felt herself rooted down with shock for the second time in as many minutes.

_ Weights, _ they’d said. Like with the hint, it wasn’t  _ technically _ a lie.

Purple hair pooled around the dead body she’d once called Mara. And then there was the other kid, still bent in half - the one Seth had been so upset about.

Someone up top thought they were  _ so _ clever. All Annie could think was that this would require two trips.

Grabbing the clammy, decomposing flesh of a stranger, Annie began dragging. They weighed too much for her to sling them over her shoulder, unfortunately, so they bumped and slid over the floor in starts and stops. She tried not to think about it.

Another turn in the hallway revealed long, horizontal slits in the walls. Aha. She wasn’t surprised when there were panels in the floor, positioned so they’d be easy to avoid if she hadn’t, y’know, been hauling a corpse. As it was, she nudged one limp leg onto them just to see what would happen.

Blades slid out, not directly above the panel, and began gliding back and forth. They hadn’t come out of every slit, but it wasn’t hard to figure out that different panels would trigger different heights of blades, thus making them harder to avoid. Annie was sure there was a pattern to them. She was also sure she was already able to see her own breath, and didn’t have time to figure it out.

Half crouched over, since it would allow her to avoid the highest of the blades, Annie began moving. She had plenty of close calls, but in the end the only severe cut was to Seth’s friend; having to grip the now disembodied sleeve in her teeth was horrible, but Annie couldn’t risk losing that much weight.

Next hallway, and Annie was already shivering. This one had a ceiling full of little holes, and she couldn’t see any panels or other methods of triggering the trap. Still, when she pushed the dead body forward, darts rained down. Was it some kind of laser? The darts weren’t very large, and wouldn’t be poisoned (since she was meant to die by filicide or cold). She could probably go straight through…

Turning a considering eye to the corpse, Annie decided she didn’t need dignity. They wanted a show, after all.

It wasn’t fun to make her way down the hallway on all fours, with a corpse draped over her. The hard edges of broken spine grated uncomfortably against her back. But with each muffled thump, she remembered that the pain she was in could’ve been so much worse.

And then she was home free, so to speak. There was a pit at the end of the hallway, too deep for her to ever climb out of, with a metal plate at the bottom. She dumped Seth’s friend over unceremoniously. They were already dead, and she was already shivering.

Of course it was much easier to make her way back than it had been to get there in the first place, but then she was faced with Mara’s body. She had to touch her, had to hold her, one last time. Mara would’ve wanted her to take any chance possible to live. For someone so suicidal, she’d been damn stubborn about Annie’s survival.

Still, it felt like a betrayal to hold her wrists and drag. Drag. Drag.

About halfway through the blade hallway, the guilty feeling in Annie’s gut grew into something so much worse. Or, perhaps it was more accurate to say, she felt as though she’d been punched for about thirty seconds, right up until she looked down and saw.

Silver metal, an inch into her belly.

It slipped out smooth as a dream, and she looked back to where she’d dropped Mara, her fingertips numb. The two sides of the cut slipped against each other, hurting less than they should. Bleeding less, too, and Annie supposed that was the benefit to the cold. But when she pressed a palm against it, she felt pressure from the inside, a slippery texture that -

Oh god, her organs were going to fall out. God. No.

No!

Teeth gritted and one hand forcing her intestines to stay inside, Annie continued. With only one hand, it was even harder to carry Mara. And she knew she wouldn’t be able to crawl through the dart hallway like this, not without spilling herself all over the floor, ropes of greenish purple getting under her knees, no,  _ don’t think about it. _

She’d been right, when she’d theorized she could make it through the darts without being badly injured. They hurt, but their little points didn’t go too far into her body. Compared to the awful sluggishness in her limbs, or the  _ wrong, _ displaced sensation in her belly, this was nothing. She didn’t bother taking them out as she finally,  _ finally, _ got Mara to the pit.

Rolled her in. Waited for a section of floor to slide shut over it, providing a bridge to the door, which slid open smooth as a dream to reveal her mother’s face.

Stumbling out of the horrible hallway, Annie felt herself smile, and knew she must look horrific. Little bits of metal sticking out of her, one hand clinging tight to her midsection, even though she knew when she looked down she’d see the curve of a bit of intestine peeking out of one side where she’d slipped. It didn’t matter. If they got her to a hospital, she would live.

Her mom was crying and shaking. “I’m sorry, Annie,” she said. “I’m sorry. I should never have let you do this.”

“It’s okay, Mom,” Annie soothed, though she was shocked at how hoarse her voice was. “I’m gonna make sure all your dreams come true. All of them. I’m gonna - ”

The last word never came out, as Annie’s mother shot her between the eyes.

“I don’t want to die,” the woman whispered. But then, neither had her daughter.


End file.
